Investigating Organised Crime and War Crimes by Anthony Nott

Author:Anthony Nott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Settling In

The painted sign for the Ocean Cliffs Hotel was a wonderful depiction of a yellow sandy beach sprinkled with sun bathers behind which was a clear blue sea. The reality was a multi-level underground car park with rows of accommodation containers, each equipped with two single beds, wardrobes and chests of drawers. The one highlight was the presence of a bar located centrally, the British and their beer are not easily parted even in a war zone, unlike our American cousins whose facilities are almost always ‘dry’, which makes the Brits very popular with the Americans, as I was to find out. My container (which I shared) was perfectly functional and I was actually quite happy living in this tin box.

My initial place of work was in the British embassy which was a short walk from the Ocean Cliffs. The day started with a meeting of all the embassy staff, the first item of which was a security briefing by a British army captain. He gave a summary of the previous twenty-four hours in Iraq during which time there had been sixty-five attacks, of which twenty were complex, usually involving a variety of munitions; seven civilians killed; nine unaccounted for, but no British soldiers reported killed or injured that day. This was to be a daily total which increased to about 120 attacks and many more fatalities per day up until the surge of American forces a year later. This was not at all what I was expecting and the daily thud of suicide car bombings and mortar explosions throughout Baghdad, sometimes far away and sometimes close by, became normal. My experiences during the IRA bombing campaign in London in the early 1970s paled into insignificance.

I was initially allocated a desk at the embassy where I met the very dedicated FCO staff who had a variety of responsibilities and numerous local contacts within the Iraqi upper echelons. Most of them were Arabic speakers. I noticed a number of these high powered political officers had small gaudy plastic tennis rackets (without strings) on their desks. Next to the unbearable heat it was the Iraqi fly which caused the most vexation. They are most unlike their English cousins and would lazily land on your hand which you would wave away. It would then fly off in the most ponderous manner in a wide circle and then flop straight back onto your hand from where it had started its flight. The only recourse for these boffins was to swot the said fly with what was an electronic tennis racket, its blue flash giving some break in the tedium of writing numerous ‘e-grams’ (cables) back to London.

My first weeks in the mission were taken up with getting to know the other members of the contingent, what they did and sometimes trying to understand why they did it. I was struck by an initial sense of indiscipline, lack of coherent chains of command and a series of private empires built up by different groups of the UK police contingent.

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